We lived in a rural area when I was a kid. My dad told me once that his buddy had to measure the ptarmigan[1] population in the mountains each year as part of his job.
He did this by hiking a fixed route, and at fixed intervals scare the birds so they would fly and count.
The total count was submitted to some office which used it to estimate the population.
One year he had to travel abroad when the counting had to be done, so he recruited a friend and explained in detail how to do it.
However when the day of the counting arrived his friend forgot, and it was a huge hassle anyway so he just submitted a number he figured was about right, and that was that.
Then one day the following year, the local newspaper had a frontpage headline stating "record increase in ptarmigan population".
The reason it was big news was that the population estimate was used to set the hunting quotas, something his friend had not considered...
I once worked on a reservation system for some pretty big ski resorts.
We were running late, working nights, and one of the last things we had to finish was the official statistics reports about number of guest nights etc that gets published by the government.
Lets just say that the statistics that year had little to do with reality.
Fairly sure the previous poster is describing statistics that were made up, rather than measured/sampled. Those are, for hopefully obvious reasons, not very trustworthy
Sure, but in this case the lies ended up packaged as the official tourism statistics report from the government, and I'm pretty sure it was neither the first nor last time that happened.
He did this by hiking a fixed route, and at fixed intervals scare the birds so they would fly and count.
The total count was submitted to some office which used it to estimate the population.
One year he had to travel abroad when the counting had to be done, so he recruited a friend and explained in detail how to do it.
However when the day of the counting arrived his friend forgot, and it was a huge hassle anyway so he just submitted a number he figured was about right, and that was that.
Then one day the following year, the local newspaper had a frontpage headline stating "record increase in ptarmigan population".
The reason it was big news was that the population estimate was used to set the hunting quotas, something his friend had not considered...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_ptarmigan